SUSSAN LEY - How a leader was born

The opportunity to become the first female to lead the Liberal Party came at a turbulent time. Within days, Sussan Ley had lost her mother and was steering the Coalition through an ill-considered split. She invites The Weekly into her home to discuss grit, grief and her promise to Australian women.

- WORDS by GENEVIEVE GANNON

Sussan Ley has had many challenging jobs. As an 18-year-old, she spent her nights dragging commercial vacuum cleaners through Myer in Belconnen. She was briefly an air traffic controller at Australia’s busiest airport, then worked as an aerial stock-musterer, flying low over Queensland’s parched Channel Country, herding livestock. Since being elected to parliament in 2001, she’s held high-profile cabinet ministries and served as Deputy Leader of the Opposition. She'll tell you her toughest gig was working as a shearer’s cook, which meant rising at 4am to light the wood-fired stove. She was expected to produce a hot breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus cake and pies for tea breaks, for shearers who made it known they could fire her if they didn’t like her grub.

“You made everything from scratch with kerosene fridges and wood stoves in basically something that looked like a bark hut in the hot sun,” she says. “You actually sometimes found yourself cutting up the sheep.”

That didn’t happen often, but she’s not squeamish, or afraid of hard work. On weekends, she’d drive into town to call her mother, Angela Braybrooks, on the payphone for cooking advice. “I wanted to excel,” Sussan says.

Her résumé reveals deep reserves of resilience and determination. Her newest role, however, will test her mettle. The task she faces is monumental.

On May 3, Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton was summarily dismissed by voters, along with another 14 of the party’s MPs. A decimated Coalition would remain in Opposition. The leadership was declared vacant. For Sussan, who’d been anxious about her party’s chances going into polling day, it was not the loss that was the shock, but the degree of the public's rejection.

“I didn’t expect the result to be as bad as it was,” she says. “It was a shocking defeat.”